It doesn’t matter if you have been engaging in content marketing for years, or if you are just now adding content marketing to your overall strategy. Examining the specific tactics you are employing is something that you should be doing on a regular basis. After all, there are hundreds of actions that you can take that fall under the increasingly wide umbrella of content marketing, but there are only a few things that you absolutely must be doing. As you lay out your marketing strategy for the next year, or the next quarter, take a look at these 7 crucial content marketing tactics.
1. Employing Content Diversification
If you want your content to be robust and to appeal to a wide audience, you will need to diversify. It is no longer enough to publish a text based blog and call it a day. Content diversification is easier than you think. You can begin by incorporating pictures and videos into your blogs. Next, try taking some existing presentations and converting them into Youtube videos. By doing this, you are able to benefit by recycling previously created content and add a new social media outlet to your list of available options. Speaking of content recycling, there are tools available that will allow you to take the content from your blogs and create infographics.
2. Engaging Your Customers by Using Interactive Content
People love to take quizzes and answer polls. They also like to share the results with their friends on social media in order to encourage them to participate, and they like to discuss the results. That’s a content marketing hat trick. You have sharing, engagement, and interaction. All from a simple quiz or poll or that takes a few minutes to create.
If you would like to start a bit smaller try using a utility like survey monkey to add surveys to your blog or website.
3. Treating Social Media as a Primary Focus
You know that you should be using social media to promote content. The question is, are you doing so consistently? Are you sharing content through multiple media channels? Better yet, are you creating content that others will want to share, and have you taken the steps to make your content as easy as possible to share? Finally, are you returning the favor and sharing or commenting on content that you feel is worthwhile? If you aren’t doing these things, you need to revisit a large portion of the social media side of your content marketing strategy. Chances are, this will include increasing the priority of the role of social media in your overall strategy.
4. Focusing on Content Quality
An overwhelming amount of the information that is written on content marketing deals with style (making sure the content is pleasing to the view), optimization (ensuring that your content can be found and that it works on all devices), distribution (sharing your content and getting others to do the same) and, of course, idea generation process. What’s missing is any focus on the quality of the content.
Whether you are simply curating content, creating content, or both, there must be just as strong a focus on quality as anything else.
5. Marketing to the Ideal Persona
Before you can target your content marketing strategy, you need to know who your ideal customer is. This means that you need to develop a persona that represents the person who is most likely to consume your content, and most likely to convert. If you have a branding strategy, you have probably done some of the work it takes to identify your target persona. Now, you need to take that just a bit further to identify the specific traits, values, and habits of your ideal customer persona.
6. Using Paid Channels for Content Promotion
There is a misconception that when the principles at a company embrace content marketing they have tapped into a limitless free source of marketing and promotion. This is simply untrue. While it may be possible to employ zero cost content marketing strategies temporarily, it will become necessary for most business owners to eventually spend money to promote their content by using services provided by companies like Outbrain.com. Don’t see this as a failure. In fact, the amount of time and energy that many companies spend attempting to keep content marketing free often results in them spending more money in man hours.
7. Using the Power of Email
As you discover newer ways to create and share content, it can be easy to forget that there is still value in the older, simpler ways of content marketing. Case in point, the email marketing campaign. Let’s face it, not everybody is active on social media. In fact, some people work very hard to avoid it.
Email, on the other hand, is something that nearly everybody uses. If you have a person’s email address you can send them content, information on upcoming sales, and invite their feedback.
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